There also used to be a simple extraction tool called "unwhisper" (I think) which was exclusively for extracting resources from .vis files but I don't think it extracted the .ved file, just the resources that were embedded into the main data.vis file.

If you copyright your files, scripts, resources, game etc... then anyone who extracts them & uses the files without permission, could face legal charges I suppose if you found out about it.

Imperator

6779 Posts

Newbie

37 Posts

You know, for the guys who write these tools, it's more a kind of sport. They test their skills in extracting these files. The question is what you want to have safe. If you concerned about your image files, I think they will always be extracted, every game I know has an extractor. They just the plain pngs (with little encryption but that doesn't matter) put into an archive. You know Unity games can also be completely decompiled. There is no complete protection. If there are many guys that want the files to be safer, we can change the encryption, but until now every change has been decrypted, but we can do things to make the results less valuable, for examble by removing the file names.

Thread Captain

1314 Posts

Idea : How about each compiler having his own encryption key? Since the people who buy the Visionaire are checked through your process, the extra ( I realize this is a hassle) modification on the builder will make it impossible to process by a 3rd person.

What worries me the most is that all my work could be hijacked and republished by someone else as his own work (not as much as that they are extracting the images but that what they might do with them)

Great Poster

253 Posts

You know, everything you're encrypting your files with has to be undone at runtime. There is the problem. The encryption has to be delievered in your application to be usable. And that is easy to reconstruct and would by the way make us a lot of work. I'm already thinking about possible changes and as we are already taking longer for that ...

Thread Captain

1314 Posts

I guess you could manually build each game you sell with a unique ID, if this version suddenly re appears you'd know who had the originalyou could make an installer that ping's a serverIts a shame its not Python a client is very easy

Key Killer

520 Posts

I think, any type of "Copyprotection" is a worthless investion of time and money. Talented Hackers and Crackers will crack it in no time. I mean, big companies trying to protect their software, with a hord of coders and a big financial background. And... their games got cracked/hacked anyway. Imo the Dev-Team should work on more important stuff, then filecrypting...

Forum Fan

133 Posts

GreenLight is right in the sense that someway someone will decrypt it BUT that doesn't mean that we can let it as it is. If a game can be decrypted by everyone then the most likely course of events is for Visionarie game developers to switch to a more secure option (which is something that we want to avoid since we love Visionaire)

So IMO the dev-team should prioritize this.

A simple change in the code could mean that they will have to review everything again and again making it if not uncrackable but at least annoying. Most the these "crackers" anyway once they are done with a project they get bored after they publish their work , so it is unlikely they will keep doing it over and over again.

Great Poster

253 Posts

Visionaire would need to change how files are stored (proprietary file formats with encryption) which add overhead which is not affordable on mobile devices. This is also why Unity is so easy to decompile/extract things from, as the all the textures stored on mobile devices are essentially straight OpenGLES compressed texture formats.

There is no "fixing" it. In deciding on what game engine to use for some projects that are in planning stages my requirements favor multiplatform over anything else, and absolutely no "packaged game engine software" out there can't be reverse engineered. The game engines have to take "hackers, modders, bad-faith translators, and cheaters" into this kind of consideration from day 1, and that's generally not a priority for single-player games. Multiplayer and MMO games even fail to take this into consideration as well, and the end result is the destruction of their revenue stream as people quit playing because the cheats/mods/hacks ruin the ability to play the game with others.

Anyway. The developers of Visionaire could do something more clever, like using Image atlases (to take advantage of GPU features) so at the very least, reassembling the original image is more manual effort than what is currently done.

If you're worried about games being pirated, release on the PC/Windows platform last. If you're more worried about assets being extracted, well people are capable of screen capturing losslessly and lossless video capture, and there are ways of redirecting OpenGL,DirectX calls to capture the actual changes made to video memory, so just consider this a lost cause. If someone is desperate enough to extract the game assets, they will.

As a final note, encryption of the assets requires releasing new asset patch files, which consume more disk space, or re-releasing all the assets repackaged with new encryption which would put off players re-installing the game if they have to download 1-4GB for trivial changes.